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Transactional distance (TD), the perception of psychological distance between the student and his peers, his instructor/teacher, and the learning content, has long been a prominent construct in research on distance education. Today, distance education primarily takes place over the internet, with technology mediating engagement and communication. Because transactional distance in online distance learning will always rely on technologically-mediated communication or interaction, we argue that in order to get the full picture, this aspect of technological mediation needs to be considered. For this purpose, we introduce a new scale for measuring transactional distance between students and the learning technology (TDSTECH), comprised of two interrelated dimensions. Reliability, convergent, and discriminant validity suggest a suitable scale. Preliminary inferential analyses are conducted with multiple linear regression and mediation analysis. Regression models show that TDSTECH is the single most important predictor of satisfaction in this population. This may have important implications for practitioners trying design and facilitate satisfying online distance learning experiences. Also, mediator analysis reveals that TDSTECH mediates the relationship between TD student-teacher and satisfaction, but not for TD student-content. Surprisingly, TD student-student shows no significant relationship with satisfaction. Implications for practice and further research are discussed.

Due to the pervasiveness of online technology, especially social media and social networking sites (SNS) like Twitter and Facebook were are surrounded by a constant stream of information about other individuals. On the other hand, even though distance and online learning has become mainstream, there are still concerns leveled at many of these educational offerings, one of them being the relative social isolation of online and distance students. In this study, we investigate if and how ambient awareness, a concept originated in research in interpersonal effects of SNS, can play an important role in how salient social impressions of peers emerge and how this leads to perceptions of social presence among students. To this end, we use an impression formation paradigm in a four-week online distance course (N = 51). We found that students were able to form impressions of their peers through ambient awareness. These impressions differed in prevalence from the ones gathered through direct social interaction. In a larger second sample (N = 169), we find ambient awareness to be a mediator between the sociability of the learning environment and perceptions of social presence. Implications, limitations and suggestions for further research are discussed.

Motivation is a crucial factor for students' learning behavior and plays a key role in the concept of gamification to foster students' motivation through specific gamification mechanics and elements. User types for gamification and associated gamification mechanics can classify students' interests and learning preferences and provide explanations for their motivational learning behavior. This study investigated how five gamification user types may relate to six mainly used online learning activities in a distance online bachelor's and master's class in educational science through the use of a systematic approach. A total of 86 students participated in the questionnaire in a cross-sectional study. The findings showed average agreement shares for all five gamification user types. The correlations revealed that the six online learning activities were at least significantly connected to one of the five gamification user types, and both person-centered and environment-centered perspectives were displayed. Finally, the results were discussed, and implications were derived for a motivational design.

During the past two decades, volition, defined as the ability to stay task-focused and ward off distractions, has become of special relevance for educational research and practice. It describes how decreased motivation or negative emotions can be dealt with by applying action control strategies. However, despite its potential, an important area of education has neglected volitional considerations: distance education (DE). This seems paradoxical because by its very nature distance education requires a great deal of persistence and effort that is volitional. Consequently, the present paper introduces a conceptual framework built on volitional theories; it aims to augment traditional perspectives and to analyse major challenges to DE, such as dropout rates. The paper reports results from a longitudinal study (September 2007-July 2009) that was conducted to determine the factorial structure of the Volitional Persona Test (VPT), an online instrument to assess volitional competence, and to obtain detailed information on students' volitional competence at a large DE university and at numerous traditional universities in German-speaking countries. It was demonstrated that the construct of volition can be subdivided into distinct factors, volitional self-efficacy, consequence control, emotion control, and meta-cognition, which may enable the development of support systems that are tailored to learners' individual needs. Implications for future research are discussed. (Contains 2 tables and 1 footnote.)

This study investigated the use of gamification in blended learning for a bachelor's degree class in educational technology. Points and leaderboards in class were implemented to research the influence on intrinsic motivation and collaborative learning. In the quantitative part, comparative data was collected in a between-groups design. Forty-six participants took part in the control group (non-gamified) and 51 students participated in the treatment group (gamified). In the qualitative part, follow-up in-depth interviews with six participants from the gamified seminars were conducted. Quantitative findings showed a significant difference for both variables 'Intrinsic Motivation' and 'Collaborative Learning' between both groups. Qualitative findings revealed that students appreciated an active engagement through the gamification concept, as it helped towards purposeful learning behavior, fostered team spirit in the working groups, and supported increased collegial and professional interaction. Finally, a well-structured peer review allowed for assessment of student's learning progress.

Many forms of e-learning (such as online courses with authentic tasks and computer-supported collaborative learning) have become important in distance education. Very often, such e-learning courses or tasks are set up following constructivist design principles. Often, this leads to learning environments with authentic problems in ill-structured tasks that are supposed to motivate students. However, constructivist design principles are difficult to implement because developers must be able to predict how students perceive the tasks and whether the tasks motivate the students. The research in this article queries some of the assumed effects. It presents a study that provides increased insight into the actual perception of electronic authentic learning tasks. The main questions are how students learn in such e-learning environments with "virtual" reality and authentic problems and how they perceive them. To answer these questions, in two e-learning programs developed at the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) designers' expectations were contrasted with student perceptions. The results show a gap between the two, for students experience much less authenticity than developers assume. (Contains 4 tables.)

Gamification has gained a lot of attention in recent years as a possible way to foster students’ motivation and learning behavior. As a high drop-out rate is associated with distance learning, in particular with students often struggling to engage with the material, the implementation of gamification may support and enhance more successful online learning. A distance learning Bachelor degree class was selected as a case study to investigate the implementation of a Moodle-based gamification concept as well as different variables associated in using a mixed-methods-approach. Eight students were interviewed and 32 participated in an online survey. Significant positive correlations were found between students’ online learning readiness in the dimension of technical competencies and both types of autonomous motivation (identified and intrinsic motivation). A significant positive correlation was also found between self-reported attitudes towards gaming and the dimension of coping of study-satisfaction. As expected, students who indicated rather low online learning readiness tended to show non-autonomous motivation (amotivation). Surprisingly, some students reported autonomous motivation, despite having expressed a rather dismissive attitude towards playing online and computer games in general. Acquiring digital badges reportedly felt like appreciation directly awarded by the students’ instructor. Progress bars were positively evaluated and were accepted as a management tool for individual learning strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]